Minority Students’ Responses to Racism: The Case of Cyprus

ABSTRACT

While research has focused on the role of racism in (re)producing ethnic/racial inequalities in education, there is very little research that investigates how variability in minority students’ responses to racism can be explained. By using an ecological approach to integrate existing research on actors’ responses to racism, this study finds that researchers have generally neglected factors and processes situated at the micro- and meso-levels of analysis. Qualitative interview data with Turkish–Cypriot children enrolled in schools in the predominantly Greek-speaking part of the Republic of Cyprus are used to investigate their strategies in response to racism and the factors that explain the observed variability in their responses. The findings suggest the importance of and interactions between factors situated at different levels of analysis, including the level of organizations and social groups and face-to-face interactions in explaining variability in young people’s responses to racism.

Keywords:

• racism
• coping
• qualitative research
• Cyprus
• schools

5.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank all participating students and schools for their collaboration with the research project on which this paper is based.

6. Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Only pseudonyms are used in this paper when referring to particular respondents or schools.

2 This information was obtained through analysis of survey data administered from a random sample of students in both schools (88% of the students from Green Lane and 66% of the students from Red Brick participated with this survey).

Additional information

Funding

This research was possible through the financial support of the Cyprus Research Promotion Foundation [grant number ANΘPΩΠIΣTIKEΣ/KOINΩ/0308(BIE)/08] and the Foundation for Scientific Research Flanders (FWO) [grant number 1.2.533.09.N.00.